If you’re working all day and your business still isn’t growing the way it should, this is likely the reason.
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I share a moment with my son that hit a little too close to home and explain why doing everything yourself eventually becomes the thing holding you back. You’ll see how to spot the tasks that keep your business stuck and what actually needs your time if you want to grow.
Take five minutes today, audit your tasks, and decide what needs to come off your plate next.
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SPEAKER_00
Just so you know, last week I was outside with my son driving his remote control car, or we were driving remote control cars as it were. My RC car is broken, so I was just watching him drive his. He wants me to buy him a Traxxis X-Max, which is a serious machine if you know anything about RC cars. It’s huge, it’s fast, and it’s a lot of fun. I want one too. And out of nowhere, he looks at me and says, Dad, you spend so much time working in your office, you should have enough money to buy me an X-Max by now. So I paused because I don’t want to give him a knee-jerk response, right? But these are a lot of money. And he wasn’t being like Braddy or like a kid. He was he was being logical, he was being serious, normal, a seven-year-old. And he had made a simple direct observation. If dad, me, works a lot, then the results should follow. And for him, those results meant well, he gets this big ol’ nice shiny X-Max because more time in the office equals more money. That’s the math, right? Except we know that’s not how it works. We know that time spent working does not automatically equal growth, not even close. And so there I am as his father, trying to think about do I not just go buy him an X-Max right now? That comment stuck with me for the rest of the day, and obviously until now, because I keep thinking about course creators, the course creators that I talk to every week. A lot of them are working all the time, and their businesses are not growing the way they want. And the reason, more often than not, is the same problem I needed to explain to my son. So there’s a stage in every course business where it’s just you. Like you wear every hat. I’ve worn every hat back in my course creation days when I taught Chinese to expats living in China, and you listening to me right now, you do every task, or you have done every task if you pass this stage, and that’s fine. That stage is necessary, but there’s another stage where being the only person doing the work stops being scrappy and it starts being, well, you start being the actual bottleneck. Here’s what I mean. If you’re doing all the things right now, and I mean writing emails, making the graphics, scheduling the posts, answering your support questions that come in in your email or that happen in your Facebook group or online community, recording and uploading the podcast show episodes, formatting the show notes, organizing your hard drive, managing your calendar, running or managing everything in Asana, editing your own videos. I’m not saying those are bad, like none of those tasks are bad, but they don’t grow the business, they maintain it. Meanwhile, the things that actually move the needle sit undone, right? Creating content, building partnerships, refining your offer, strategically planning, and then running webinars, improving your messaging. Those things require your full attention or your and or your best energy. If you start your morning in a support inbox, that saps your energy, and your energy is almost gone by the time you sit down to write, or whatever it is that you know, because of those dining room table conversations you have with your partner, you know that those would move the needle forward. The moment your business starts working is the moment you stop doing everything inside of it. And that’s not theory, that is what I’ve watched happen over and over with course creators I work with. And you may you might be like, Quajo, you’re an ad manager. What are you talking about? You only deal with course creators who have already working businesses, and you’re at the top of their funnel. What do you know about their businesses? Well, I want to remind you, humbly so, that when I got stuck outside of China because I took a vacation to Mexico with my wife and my my nine-month-old son and my three-year-old daughter back in January 13th of 2020, and my life fell apart. And that previous course creation business I had fell apart. The first job that I had was coaching inside of a high-level mastermind/slash group coaching program. It’s actually the same program that I had paid to be a part in before with my previous Chinese business where I taught Mandarin Chinese, and that one was growing because of this program. I spent, I have spent a lot of time, about three years actually, working with course creators who had just passed this hurdle, but guess what? Fell into it again. Because you and me, we are, we can do all the things. That’s how we started our businesses. And so we tend to slip back into that trap. Okay. Speaking of getting things off your plate, I want to mention this real quick. Right now I’m recording this episode. My wife and I are finishing up a couple of hiring projects for online course creators. This is not something that I talk about publicly a lot because it’s something, well, that I’ve had to do by myself for myself over the years, and then something that my wife has done for clients. And they like it. She handles the whole process writing the job post, filtering the applicants, running interviews, giving candidates a trial test, and then giving you the final short list so that you’re not spending weeks on hiring and that you actually can hire somebody right the first time. So if you’re listening to this episode and you are like, oh my gosh, this is me. My business is successful, but it can’t grow anymore because you’re spending the time doing all the things that you know aren’t moving the needle. Moving the needle, that’s such an overused term, that you know are not adding dollars to your monthly revenue or growing your business in the way that you feel like it should be growing late at night when you’re thinking about it, then click the link below. It’s not on my website, so this isn’t like wait till later, click the link below right now, and go and fill out the quick application. And my wife will be in touch with you, and we can work on getting you your second or even third team member hired from the Philippines, an individual who can help you, who’s glad to work in your business and help you move your business forward. All right, let’s get back to the episode. So most entrepreneurs try to solve this bottleneck problem the only way they know how. Working more hours. Raise your hand over there on the other side of the screen or on the other side of the phone if you’ve done this, because I just raised my hand. I’ve done this. Get up earlier, stay up later, squeeze in the strategy work after the admin work is done. Apologize to whomever it is that cares about you most because you can’t do the things in the evening, because you have got to dedicate to growing the business. And it is the business that matters because it brings in the income and you’re the sole income earner. Maybe I’ve done that. The issue here is it’s like trying to outrun a treadmill that keeps speeding up. Because as the business grows, the admin work grows with it. The support tickets multiply, you’re selling more of your course, and you have more new people coming in to learn from you in the way that you are uniquely skilled to help them. Social media demands more out of you, launches get more complex, more hours working just does not fix the capacity problem when those hours are filled with the wrong things. The type of work you’re doing matters as much as the volume of work. If not more, actually. The quality of work you’re doing matters a lot more than the volume of work. If your days are full of tasks that keep the business running but don’t grow it, you will always feel busy and you will always feel behind. The question that changes everything is not how can I find more time? It’s who can I bring in so that my time goes to the things that only I can do. So I want to hang out here for a moment. When you hire help, most people frame that as a business efficiency decision. Like you delegate tasks so you can focus on the things like higher value work. And yes, that’s true, but there is another way to see it. The person who you hire, they get meaningful work, they get income, they get stability, they get a chance to be good at something and to contribute to something real, something that matters, your business, and actually have an impact on people’s lives. By no baikan. I’ve hired multiple people over the years, and right now I work with four people across part-time and full-time roles. One of the things I notice is that the people that I work with are not just filling a job slot, they’re they’re building something for themselves too. Their skills grow, their confidence grows, but really they’re also working and building their lives. One person I’m thinking of, they live and they work and supporting their husband as he teaches at school. And she works with me and is also taking care of two kids in another country, living abroad, just like I am. It’s actually a cool story. She does marketing part-time even for a local a local company in Taiwan, and she speaks, she learned Mandarin Chinese, just like me. We’ve actually known each other for several years. Another um guy I’m thinking of likes to run. We we share, we we we’ve worked with each other for a while now, and we share a Christian faith, we share an enjoyment for video games, you know, we both really care about our parents. I’ve come to learn that over the years. And he has a little brother, and the same way that he cares for his little brother, and some of the struggles that his little brother goes through are quite similar to my daughter. And so as you begin to hire people, you really begin to become a part of their lives and empower them. Literally, it’s a paycheck. It can be more if you take the time to get to know them a bit. But I want you to understand that hiring a VA is not just delegation, it’s job creation. And that is a meaningful thing to do. Dare I dare I say it’s life creation. Not that not that we could ever be so proud or self-centered to say that we create lives with our jobs, but you gotta remember that it takes money to live. Therefore, when somebody works, when I work, when I make money, when you make money, we’re exchanging like time of our life, like part of our life for money. So we can go and do the things that we want to use money for. And yeah, a lot of it can go to fixed cost, you know, food and shelter, right? But there’s it also a decent part of it that goes into developing our own skills and gifts. And so, in a way, maybe it’s maybe maybe having a job or hiring somebody for a job is life empowerment. One other thing that could be holding you back is the fact that you have not turned on paid advertising yet. I’m speaking to you directly if you don’t run Facebook and Instagram ads, but you’re grossing over 150,000 to 200-ish thousand dollars a year, and you know for a fact that you already have a lead magnet that builds your list well, and you launch multiple times a year, or you have a suite of maybe two to three low-ticket offers, you know, under$37, and you post about those on your organic social media. I’m thinking about Instagram here, and people are commenting a phrase to get DM’d, and people are buying your offer. You’re not struggling in your business, and yet you’re wondering, is ads management the right move for you? I’m describing you because if this is you, I want you to hear me that you are the kind of person that I work with normally. And you should click down below, go to my website and fill out an intake form, and we can have a conversation about how ads management could take your business to the next level of revenue. So hit that link in the show notes below, and I look forward to talking to you. All right, let’s get back to it. I’ve been in this hiring process enough times now to know, well, that I’ve gotten pretty good at it, actually, and I’ve helped over 20 businesses go through it themselves. I’ve helped my own business, I’ve hired people for myself, and honestly, it never gets old. And it sounds simple. Somebody says, Oh, you know what? You could hire someone in the Philippines, and conceptually, yeah, it’s great. And I I have a friend or two with an online course business, and they hire they hired somebody, they have somebody working part-time for them who lives in the Philippines or full-time. It’s going great. The hiring process must be kind of easy until you post the job, until you get 80 applications saying all saying the same thing. And suddenly you’re spending like a full week just reading through them, and then you’re not even sure. Because everyone has a portfolio, most have a resume, and the writing, it’s like you can tell that people are enthusiastic, but who would actually make the best hire for your business and work the best with you? Who’s going to take the job just as seriously and follow through on their commitments? Who’s going to work out six months a year from now? Who can you trust inside of your project management system on the back end of like your business? So you schedule interviews, half the people don’t show up. The ones who do show up aren’t what you expected from their resume, and you’re back to square one. That’s that’s why we handle the whole thing because a lot of it has to do with the kinds of questions you ask and the process that you set up so that the right person can rise through the top and make it through your process, and you can find them and you can interview them instead of maybe ending up with the wrong person because you’re kind of guessing your way through this hiring process and hoping for the best. So I’m out there in the grass with my son, and he thought, dad works a lot, so the results should show up. As in, money should be here to buy me a radio control, remote control car. I guess they’re the same thing, huh? And that’s simple. Seven-year-old logic from a kid who doesn’t understand that hours and impact are not the same thing. But the good news is that the fix isn’t complicated, it’s just a decision. Stop doing everything yourself, bring someone in. Free yourself up to do the work that only you can do, that you were meant to do. Bless somebody else with a chance to do work that they can do that maybe they were meant to do. So I got a challenge for you. This week, do a quick audit of your tasks. Open up your calendar or your task list, or if you use a sauna like me, open up a sauna and look at wherever you write down your tasks and just put a mark next to each of them: a G for growth and an M for maintenance. Growth tasks are the things that could directly move your business forward. They’re the things that you know would grow your business, or at least have a chance to grow your business, right? That’s the content creation, that’s spending time working on your email funnel or your webinar or strategic partnerships, getting on more sales calls, maintenance tasks, that’s everything that quote unquote keeps the lights on, but would not be missed if somebody else handles them. And if your M column is larger than your G column, you have your answer. That list very well contains the job description for your first hire. Until the next time you hear from me or see me, take care, be blessed, and I’ll see you in the next one.
